Posts by LucreLout

Re: They'll grow up

An acquaintance is trying to sell his maisonette with only 50 years left on the nominal 99 year lease. No one will offer a buyer a mortgage for that reason. The potential cash buyer is a BTL landlord who owns about 20 properties. Even then the already low offer was conditional on him splashing out £36K first for the lease extension/buy out. In the end it is rumoured he has sold a potentially £260K property for £160K.

Assuming the case presented is true, your friend is an idiot.

Instead of dropping 36k to increase the price by 100k, he's given away twice as much money in the discount he's given the buyer. Those are the facts as you've presented them.

Then where is the demand coming from if so many people are getting priced OUT of the market (demand implies people can afford to buy)?

Being priced out of Chealsea does not mean you are priced out of the market. As demostrated repeatedly, even the minimum waged can afford to buy a home..... they just can't afford to buy the home of their dreams at first time of asking.

Re: They'll grow up

most minimum wage jobs are zero hour contracts these days

http://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-7735/CBP-7735.pdf

https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/articles/contractsthatdonotguaranteeaminimumnumberofhours/september2017

So we can see that not only are you fundamentally wrong with your assertion, even assuming that all zero hours contracts pay minimum wage, but further, even if everyone on zero hours contracts is a millenial, "the number of people employed on “zero-hours contracts” in their main job, during April to June 2017 was 883,000, representing 2.8% of all people in employment." 2.8%....

Now let this sink in "People on “zero-hours contracts” are more likely to be young, part-time, women or in full-time education when compared with other people in employment." So, tell me again, when students have ever bought houses? Or part time workers? That'll be never then.

Taking a mortgage is a serious risk in these conditions as at any time you can find yourself not only jobless but also homeless while still being tens of thousands in debt to the bank.

And yet that seems a lot less risky than also losing your job and having rent to find. Rent that the landlord will keep increasing. Especially given the government will pay the interest on your mortgage up to £200,000 - https://www.gov.uk/support-for-mortgage-interest/what-youll-get

Trying to save the 10% while paying rent/bills etc could take years and savings can be quickly and unexpectedly eaten up by one disaster such as the car which is needed to get to work needing repair.

You're going to find that has always been the case and yet other generations somehow managed to weather the storm.

Buying a flat is not really a purchase.

Fundamentally untrue unfortunately.

You will never own the property, they tend to be on a 99 year lease.

Fortunately lifespans tend to be less than that, so what you have there wouldn't be a problem, even if you couldn't renew or extend the lease, which you near universally can. The next but one town over to me is mostly leasehold at 999 years.

Add to that the additional expense on top of the mortgage of ground rent and service charges for the upkeep of the building.

You'll find that whatever home you buy requires upkeep and repair work. Your rent isn't only the landlords coke & hookers money.

You've basically posted a fact free response without a single citation or accurate calculation. You've made a lot of assumptions readily provable as false with 30 seconds work on google. Its no wonder you think your life is hard if you can't do 30 seconds work to seperate fact from fiction.

Facts people, use them to form opinions, your feelings however deeply held simply don't count for shit.

Re: They'll grow up

So, with that £1300/month before tax -> say £1000/month received.

£1,205 actually, so you're only out by 20% so far.

Average around £100/month to commute (because the cheap places aren't next door to where you work)

No, but minimum wage jobs ARE right next to where you live. Thus your commuting cost should be £0.00

It makes literally no sense to spend £5 per day (your number) commuting when you can walk to the end of your street or the next one over and get a minimum wage job there.

Rent of £600/month.

You must be joking. Rightmove shows more than 600 properties within 40 miles of Luton for a maximum of £400. There's an extra £200 in the pot right there, combined with the extrat £200 you got wrong on the tax calculation, and the £100 commute cost you're up to £500 saving already.

It's all easy when you've got money. It's bloody tough when you're on the poverty line.

The trick is to get from the latter to the former. It helps if you start by getting your numbers, and so facts, correct. You've doubled down on the costs for even minimum wage individuals, which is why you can't see the wood for the trees.

You're entitled to disagree, but you're going to need to start presenting somme facts by way of rebuttal, not just downvotes and emotion; it's a good name for a band, but no way to win a debate.

Re: Alternatives

I wonder if the decrease in alcohol consumption linked to increasing acceptability and availability of soft drugs?

No need to hang out in a pub or nightclub drinking all night in the hope of getting laid - you just whip out your mobile and swipe... right (I think). If they'd had this sort of stuff when I was 20, I'd have drank less too!

Re: They'll grow up

Buying a house is one of those fantasies old people talk about.

This? Again? Seriously?

40 hour work week @ min wage of £7.83 = £313.12 / week or £16,286.40 per annum.

That produces a mortgage amount of £57,002.40 (3.5 times salary) or £130,291.20 for a couple (4x joint salary).

Add to that the 10% deposit and we get a total available of £62,702.40 and £143,320.20

I've deliberately ignored things like overtime, any welfare top ups, and the fact that most people don't earn the minimum wage.

Thus a single person can well afford a one bed flat in much of the country and a couple can afford a small family home almost anywhere. I've used Luton as a starting point and there's 78 properties available within 40 miles for the single person, and almost 2000 available for the couple. The same search for Barnsley yields 1168 results and almost 9000 respectively.

I trust that we can now lay this cannard of the young to rest, yes?

What you can't buy, what people have never been able to buy, was the equivalent of the family home you grew up in as a first house, or a zone 1 London flat. Its called the housing ladder for a reason - you start at the bottom and work your way up. The term "Starter home" has a clue in the name.

It's not something anyone in the UK wants to address, house prices are a growing problem that's going to bite it in the arse while everyone looks for something else to blame

Houses are expensive - they pretty much always have been throuoghout history. Yes, some boomers got cheap houses, but most people didn't.

I've demonstrated with numbers on this site previously why owning a home within a reasonable commute (ie shorter than my schelpathon into that London) is possible for even a minimum wage couple. Buying on your own is also possible, but it'll be a small flat, not a family home.

Out of all the Millenials I work with, only one has bought their own property in their 20s, and he did that by saving hard for a deposit while renting as cheaply as possible, and then buying where he could afford (Essex, not zone 2 in London) and living with the 50 minute commute to work. He's not done anything the rest of his cohort couldn't have chosen to do, they just preferred to rent a more expensive place nearer work to live a "London lifestyle" (whatever that may be).

I'm an old giffer now (Gen X) but I couldn't buy until I was in my early to mid 30s, because I didn't understand how money worked and ran up some impressive debts partying. Millenials are time rich, and there's really no imperative for them to jump on the housing ladder at the age most of them now are - they have plenty of time for the compromises, commitments, and trade offs a mortgage brings when they're in their 30s.

Re: Getting mighty tired with the dumb snowflakes already!

@Windrose

Thanks for your offended for no reason millenial rant. Most amusing.

Were I delivering a lecture on biology, or even gender, then perhaps they might have had a cause to object, but the lecture was on code architectures. They seemed to completely miss the point of why Single Responsibility was important because they were so hett up about an irrelevant data typing. Much as you're doing now. That you don't see the irony doesn't mean it isn't there.

The reason that your generation is a joke to all of the generations before you, is that you're just so fragile and reactionary to anything that varies even one degree away from your precious right-on fact free world views. In your rush to emote over perceived wrongs, you utterly fail to grasp why anyone might have a different, perhaps more informed, view to your own. Your intollerance of the very idea is why you're just oh-so-special.

You don't change gender by changing outfit. You just don't. Clever plastic surgery might make you look like the other gender, but appearances can be deceiving - a post op male does not for example inherit a females life expectancy or reproductive capacity.

Define yourself by whatever gender you choose for whatever reasons you like. Just don't expect to force me to define you by the same conditionals. I care not if you choose to feel a different gender, ethincity whatever than that of your birth, but I do care if you try to force me to recognise your view of yourself when I can see reality may vary.

Re: Getting mighty tired with the dumb snowflakes already!

I had to give a lecture ot a bunch of grads recently, and happened to use a bit flag for gender. I wasn't intentionally being a dick about it, it's just that's what we always used when I was their age. I noticed next time I turned around that I seemed to have lost them while explaining the basics of SRP. The snowflakes looked so physically uncomfortable I thought they might be sick.

"Gender isn't binary" says one. "Gender is a social construct" says another.

"I'm pretty sure you're going to find it isn't anything to do with society." says I, "It's a natural biological imperative. Anyway, go to any maximum security prison - you'll find a lot of men wishing some of them were women, and you'll find some men pretending to be women, but that don't make it so."

In the end I made gender an int because hurting their feelings with facts wasn't really what I wanted to accomplish.

For the record, I care not whether a man wants to dress and live as a woman (up to and including having their knackers lopped off), and I care not if a woman wants to dress and live as a man - It's your life and you should absolutely live it your way; it isn't anyone elses business. But, your chromasomes are something you're born with and they define your gender (XX or XY), not your lifestyle.

Re: Maybe a silly question, but...

Seriously, though, Mumsnet is a great place to while away an hour or two. It's like a continuous stream of Jeremy Kyle - stupid people making bad choices with car-crash entertaining results.

Mumsnet is without doubt one of the more batshitcrazy corners of the internet, and while it may be entertaining to laugh your ass off at them, collectively, they're probably responsible for more divorces than anywhere else on the web.

A nest of vipers yelling LTB (Leave The Bastard, I think) at each other, in some competetive game to see who can get the most new posters to leave their relationship and join them wallowing in misery. Unfortunately, nobody seems to give a crap about the inevitable impact it has on the kids. And no, I'm not divorced, and my Mrs took one look at Mumsnet and asked "Are they mad?"

Mumsnet: Just say no.

Re: It's Like Burning Books

When we commodify research we limit the potential of human advancement.

Quite. It's almost like Aaron Swartz didn't happen. Gone too soon: forgotten already.

RIP Aaron - I might not have agreed with his methods, but I do agree with his aims.

Re: The Elite and Super-Rich are busy planning for it:

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2017/01/26/us-business-elite-prepares-for-crisis_n_14420284.html

An interesting article - thanks for the link.

Their definition of millionaire is, I would argue, too vague. Wealth held in pensions, for instance, may not be accessible depending on the age of the person, and so is effectively beyond their reach. Most people use accessible assets other than primary place of residence as the threshold for this reason.

If you have 500k in pensions, and 500k outside of that, are you really able to simply flit country to country carefree, buying worst case scenario homes, vehicles etc?

The UK is too small and too over populated for anyone to realistically plan their way out of an apocolypse - short of a sealable bunker close to home that nobody else knows about (especially the neighbours). You'd have to hide for a few months while the masses wipe each other out and or starve before you could fall back on a tent, some kindling, and a sharp camping knife.

Re: If you've got a better 'ole

We hope for our criminal justice system to deliver rehabilitation, deterrence, punishment and protection for the innocent, which is a collection of largely incompatible aims, and we are surprised when it does none of them well.

The problem is caused because of an obsession with arbitrarily short tariffs.

The proper sequence of events is deterrence, crime, punishment, and then rehabilitation. Skipping over the punishment part in a headlong rush to get people back on the street with minimal inconvenience to their lives is corrupting the punishment part of the process and that is leading to it being no deterrent.

People don't spit gum on the street in Singapore both because of social norms, and also because serving a very long time in jail for it IS a deterrent. In the UK, provided it is a first offence and you plead guilty at the first hearing, you can freely commit GBH resulting in the hospitalisation of your victim with multiple broken bones, and you will walk out of court with a suspended sentance. That is not a deterrent, it is not really a punishment, and it is certainly not going to rehabilitate you.

How do you explain the 2 year delay on your CV?

Truthfully, or how rehabilitated are you?

The last time I saw numbers for this, 1 in 3 British men had a conviction for a crime of some sort. Really the only reason convictions for youthful stupidity are a problem as an adult is because we're not transparent about this - concealing convictions under the Rehab Act is distorting most peoples view of how prevalent historic offending is within their own group of colleagues.

Re: That takes me back

What do we expect as we all sit here, young and old, choosing emojis instead of writing "hey that's shit".

Don't get me started on Emoji's!!!

Shopping last weekend, and in return for an extra shot in my latte (that's not a euphamism), I had to drag our 4 year old around some tat bazar the Mrs wished to browse.

Mini-mrs runs off to find toys to look at, and returns hugging a giant emoji turd. She's grinning ear to ear as she dances about asking if I'll buy it for her. The staff are doubled up laughing as clearly she has no idea what it is she's hugging, it just has big eyes and a large smile.

"Go ask your mam if you can have it."

Re: The Model 3 is coming.... er??? 2019 or is that 2020?

IMHO, the Model 3 is the wrong car for Europe in that it is a sedan/saloon and it is too expensive.

I think the model 3 could be perfect for Europe. It could replace both my family car and my play thing, in terms of 0-60 time and practicality (doors, space etc). Most of the time I use the abnormally high power output of the play thing to get the drop on traffic exiting roundabouts / lights etc, creating space for the morons to do their thing without banging into me; I rarely use the full output for very long.

Now, before everyone hits me over the head with the "electric cars won't work at scale due to the grid" stick, I agree, however, for me (assuming you lot don't switch over) a model 3 could work really rather well.

The snag is, the price is higher than I pay for my cars, so I'd have to wait until it drops about half its value, so likely to be 10 years after they crack the mass production issue.

Re: Replacing the batteries.

Are you high? Engines degrade over time with wear and tear on the drive train, on the valves, maintaining compression etc. Do you really think that when you stick a 10-20yr old car* on a dyno it will generate the same bhp?

It depends on how well its looked after. When I had my play thing tuned on a rolling road [1], it'd lost half a pony from book value in 15 years (0.5 bhp drop). In the interests of full disclosure, its given a full service annually and an oil change every 6k or after winter whatever comes first.

EFI and ignition coupled with proper exhaust gas analysis mean coking doesn't happen any more, and wear & tear can be minimised with a proper warm up and cool down procedure and frequent oil & filter changes. Modern oils are a massive help too.

Don't mistake this post for concern that a Tesla loses 10% of range over 160k miles - that sort of range drop doesn't bother me. As I've posted before, my bladder can only manage about 200 miles between stops, so anything with a greater range is mostly workable for me these days.

[1] its normal to do a before and after run if you're having a lot of work done so you can validate the improvement and ensure any problem isn't caused by the changes.

Re: Replacing the batteries.

And the range drops 33% when it hits zero degrees (freezing) and about 50% by the time it reaches -10. I hate to think what it is at -30.

If the UK ever got down to -30 I'd be staying home. Southerners simply can't drive in the snow [1], and a progression down to -30 will likely result in snow frequently in the UK. There's no point going out to try and drive if the road will be impassable because of abandoned vehicles.

[1] - Sorry folks, but its true. In fairness, the south gets about 5 minutes snow a year, so most locals just don't have any real experience of it.

I'm not having this, there is no way Audi and BMW drivers are highly evolved.

Anyone choosing a marque that displays 4 cock rings on their grille as a warning to other road users has clearly not thought through their choice of car.

Why do these politicians think that they have the investigative credentials of a seasoned detective.

Why? Dunning Kruger, I suspect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect

Why else would a postman or lawyer think he should be running the country rather than delivering mail or chasing ambulances?

Re: ex-NHS

Half of them don't even have proper background and experience.

In fairness to NHS IT, that's not entirely unusual in the private sector. Some of my managers have been outstanding, most have been ok, many have been incompetent, and a few have been mailicous & incompetent.

Re: Glossing a commercial turd

Er, have you ever stayed in a hotel?

Not one where every bed in the whole hotel was occupied less than 60 mins before I'm getting into it, where all the sheets need changing in that time, and where there are no walls between my room and yours, no.